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Rajalekshmi Narayana Sarma
Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, one of each pair from each parent, obtained by the
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process of reductional cell division called meiosis. But before we get one chromosome from
a pair from each parent, there is recombination and shuffling between each pair. This
introduces variation to ensure that we aren’t identical half copies of each parent. From one
species to another, from one... -
Maria Virginia Ramirez Montoya
The mammalian gastrointestinal tract is a complex ecosystem that harbors trillions of microorganisms known as the gut microbiota. As microbes-host interactions are important to maintain host homeostasis, alterations in the microbial composition that lead to functional impairments can have detrimental consequences for the host (dysbiosis). In this context, diet represents one of the main...
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Guadalupe Lopez Nava
Exceptions to the rule constitute powerful examples to test commonly accepted ideas.
Within classical Darwinian sex roles, females are choosy, whereas males compete and try to mate with as many females as possible. This translates into higher variation in reproductive success and a stronger correlation between reproductive and mating success (Bateman gradient) in males compared to females...
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Prof. Miriam Liedvogel (Institut für Vogelforschung)
Understanding the genetics of bird migration is a long-standing goal in evolutionary biology. BlackcapsSylvia atricapilla are ideal for this work as different populations exhibit enormous difference in migratory behaviour and little else. We characterize (i) phenotype, population structure and demographic history the blackcap, and (ii) identify sequence variants and signaling pathways that are...
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35. Chloramphenicol reduces phage resistance evolution by suppressing bacterial cell surface mutantsLavisha Parab
Bacteriophages infect Gram-negative bacteria by attaching to molecules present on the bacterial outer membrane, often lipopolysaccharides (LPS). Modification of the LPS can lead to phage resistance. LPS modifications also impact antibiotic susceptibility, allowing for phage-antibiotic synergism. The mechanism for these synergistic interactions is unclear. Here, we show that antibiotics affect...
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Kaumudi Prabhakara
Community level evolution is an important, but understudied aspect of evolution. Directed evolution of communities can not only increase our understanding of evolution, but also has many potential applications, such as creating communities with specific functions. However, artificial evolution of communities has had limited success. Here we are interested in the co-evolution of communities in...
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Kerry Gendreau
Following the divergence of the last common ancestor of vertebrates, vertebrate brains have undergone over 500 million years of divergence and diversification, forming unique cellular networks and substructures in response to varying environmental conditions and selective pressures. Although there is a vast and growing body of research concerning the structure and function of mammalian brains,...
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Anika Du Plessis
Many hypotheses attempt to explain how life started, but there is none that is unanimously accepted. Two of the most popular hypotheses is the RNA World hypothesis and the Metabolism-first hypothesis. The Metabolism-first hypothesis suggests that life originated from ordered chemical reactions that increased in complexity over time, whereas the RNA World hypothesis favours the idea of...
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Emily Booms
Human-induced changes to the environment result in faster and less predictable variation in environmental conditions. When organisms with fast generation times, such as freshwater ciliates, are exposed to this, they can experience rapid evolution. Studies on how these evolved species would respond to sudden environmental changes are scarce. Here, we investigate how variation in environmental...
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Prof. Rosemary Grant (Princeton University)
Since Darwin’s time insights from the fields of behavior, ecology and genetics have illuminated the process of speciation. In this talk I will highlight our recent discoveries of evolution in Darwin’s finch populations in the Galápagos archipelago. Field studies of the behavior of individuals and the ecology of populations reveal how the species are reproductively and ecologically isolated....
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Francisca Hervas
Studying the origin and evolution of tissues is a main interest in comparative biology. However, a core challenge lies in the approach employed for distinguishing homology from convergence, and innovation. In recent years, the advent and development of cell type-focused technologies have allowed the use of cell type composition comparisons between organs of different species. This strategy has...
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Manasvi Balachandran
Bacteria possess intrinsic resistance mechanisms to antibiotics and also acquire resistance through mutations. While mutations that confer resistance to antibiotics have been well-characterized, intrinsic resistance remains poorly explored. In this study, we ask whether intrinsic mechanisms of resistance may be viable targets for the design of novel therapeutics. Using trimethoprim, an...
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Sarah Gaugel
Speciation encompasses genetic and phenotypic divergence, and the establishment of reproductive isolation, facilitating the coexistence of nascent species. However, some species, termed cryptic species, lack discernible morphological differences but maintain reproductive isolation through behavioral traits. These cryptic species may evade detection by visually oriented scientists, posing...
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Lingfeng Meng
Fish populations are experiencing evolutionary changes due to intense fishing pressure, known as fisheries-induced evolution (FIE). This study aims to elucidate the extent to which observed patterns in FIE result from genetic adaptation and to identify the ecological processes influencing this evolutionary shift. By examining fish stocks in the Baltic and North Sea, the research investigates...
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Marjan Ghotbi
The marine microbiome modulates oceanic biogeochemical cycles and is strongly influenced by microbe-to-microbe interactions, including interactions between phytoplankton (the base of the food web) and heterotrophic bacteria. These interactions range along a continuum of positive to negative impacts on the phytoplankton, affecting ecosystem function, and are difficult to discern in the complex...
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Jannika Elfert
Drastically changing environments can cause the extinction of populations. Adaptation to the new conditions that prevents extinction is called evolutionary rescue. The question is: How does evolution save species?
New selection pressures can cause rapid evolutionary change. This has, for example, been observed in the Pacific field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus on Hawai’i, which is under...
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Anamika Nanda
Recent work suggests a physically active hunting and gathering lifestyle may have played a role in the evolution of long human lifespans. However, the mechanisms linking physical activity (PA) with longevity remain unclear. Moderate PA is associated with longer telomere length (TL), while shorter TL has been associated with increased cellular senescence and functional decline with age. Some...
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Kim Rohlfing
Altica lythri is a hybridogenetic beetle with unique reproduction anomalies that provide an ideal model for understanding how genetic conflicts shape the sex, and thus evolution, of species. Ancient interspecific hybridization and Wolbachia bacterial infections in A. lythri resulted in introgression of mitochondrial (mt) DNA (HT1, HT2, HT3). Depending on a female’s mtDNA haplotype and...
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21. Interrelation of circalunar, circadian and photoperiodic time keeping in the marine midge ClunioJule Neumann
Marine midges of the genus Clunio inhabit the intertidal zone along rocky coasts around the world. Clunio’s life cycle is adapted to the tides. Adults of Clunio only emerge and reproduce during full moon and new moon, when the spring tides expose most of the intertidal zone. To this end, Clunio evolved endogenous time keeping mechanisms. These include the enigmatic circalunar clock, which...
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19. Mathematical modelling of effector T cell stimulation, elimination and binding with target cellsQianci Yang
Cancer is a complex, often tissue-specific disease that can lead to neoplastic outgrowth hallmarked by genetic, epigenetic, and microenvironmental factors. Tissue-disrupting tumors can occur when a population of somatic cells evolves within an organism. Adaptive tumor suppression involves the immune systems which can target pre-cancerous and cancerous cells for destruction. Compared to...
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Prof. Ayari Fuentes-Hernández (Center for Genomic Sciences, UNAM)
This presentation explores the intricate relationship between selection, chance, and evolutionary history in microbial adaptation to dynamic environments. We implement a multiscale approach to experimental evolution, allowing us to simultaneously observe individual cells and entire populations. This integration of microfluidic technology with traditional batch cultures enables detailed...
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Prof. Deepa Agashe (National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS))
Evolutionary analyses have focused on natural selection as the major driver of evolutionary change, with mutations thought to play a relatively small role. Analyses of mutation typically focus on mutation rate, because it constraints the supply of beneficial mutations during adaptation. However, a growing body of work now shows that mutation bias – whereby some types of mutations occur more...
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Prof. Katarína Boďová (Comenius University)
Some plants have developed a clever strategy to cope with the cost of inbreeding. This strategy is realized through a genetically encoded recognition system, allowing the plant to distinguish between its own pollen and that of others. Based on this distinction the plant accepts or rejects the pollen. The complexity of this system, including high dimensionality and inherent randomness, makes...
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Clara Moreno-Fenoll
Pyoverdin is a water-soluble metal-chelator synthesized by members of the genus Pseudomonas and used for the acquisition of insoluble ferric iron. Although freely diffusible in aqueous environments, preferential dissemination of pyoverdin among adjacent cells, fine-tuning of intracellular siderophore concentrations, and fitness advantages to pyoverdin-producing versus nonproducing cells,...
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Umilaela Arifin
The systematics and phylogenetic relationships of Asian ranid frogs of the genus Huia has been unstable for decades and has not been convincingly resolved. Prior to my study, five species (H. cavitympanum, H. masonii, H. sumatrana, Huia modigliani, and H. melasma) were recognized under the genus Huia. However, none of available studies suggested that Huia is a monophyletic group and provided...
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Gisela T. Rodríguez-Sánchez
The transition from single cells to multicellularity, as with all other evolutionary transitions, requires acquisition of Darwinian properties at the new-higher level of organization. Primordial groups arise readily via mutations that cause cells to clump. However, cell collectives, although comprised of cells that are themselves Darwinian, are themselves, non-Darwinian. Darwinian properties...
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Shabnam Mohammadi
The repeated evolution of resistance to widespread toxins collectively known as cardiotonic steroids represents one of the clearest examples of natural selection. Numerous plants and animals across the globe are chemically defended by these toxins, which target the vital transmembrane protein Na+K+-ATPase (NKA). In response, many herbivores and predators evolved resistance through target-site...
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Amy MacLeod
The Galapagos marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) is an iconic & endemic endangered species of the Galapagos Archipelago, Ecuador. Despite many decades of monitoring, a full and detailed population-size estimate for this species has never been obtained. Better estimates are urgently needed to offer adequate protection for the 11 unique marine iguana subspecies against emergent threats,...
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Berrit Katharina Czinczel
The aim of the presented research is to analyse individual learning trajectories on five factors of evolution in order to anticipate potential challenges to learning about evolution early and enable teachers to give more specific feedback in the future. To achieve this, we employ methods of learning analytics, utilizing large datasets from realistic classroom settings to gain deeper insights...
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Ursula Oggenfuss
Transposable elements (TEs) play an important role in genome evolution. TEs drive genomic instability, gene expression and gene evolution, frequently leading to phenotypic changes. The impact of novel TE insertions is likely deleterious; thus, ongoing TE activity is limited by purifying selection and diverse defense mechanisms, including the fungal specific repeat-induced point mutations....
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Aysha Chowdhury
Bacteria exist in nature as part of communities where they continuously interact with each other and with their own counterparts. As a result of the interaction with other microbes, microorganisms can produce numerous secondary metabolites, some of which function as signaling molecules that promote or inhibit growth. For instance, autoinducer-2(AI-2) has been shown to promote the growth of...
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Prof. Bibiana Rojas (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna)
Alfred Russell Wallace is known for his fundamental contributions to the theory of evolution as we know it. He was an exceptional naturalist who carried out extensive fieldwork in places acknowledged nowadays as biodiversity hotspots, which led him to ask key questions on the geographic distribution of animals. But some of its most influential ideas relate to the function of the wide array of...
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Nataša Puzović
The variability of gene expression levels, also known as gene expression noise, is an evolvable trait subject to selection. While gene expression noise is detrimental in constant environments where the expression level is under stabilizing selection, it may be beneficial in changing environments when the phenotype is far from the optimum. However, expression noise propagates along the gene...
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